DNA experts still identifying tsunami victims

DNA experts still identifying victimsCountries turn to Bosnia for its grisly experience with mass graves

CHRISTOPHER TORCHIA, Associated Press |
December 23, 2005

KHAO LAK, THAILAND - One year after the Indian Ocean tsunami, the world's ID sleuths press on with their grisly task. In a DNA lab in Sarajevo, the experience drawn from Bosnia's mass graves is helping to put names to bodies in a morgue at a Thai holiday resort 5,000 miles away.

DNA collected from relatives around the world, along with samples from items as mundane as a toothbrush, are being filtered through a high-tech, multinational operation to give a decent burial to the dead of the Dec. 26 disaster and a small measure of relief to the relatives left behind.

But for those whose loved ones have simply vanished without a trace, there's little to be done beyond running a picture in a newspaper, in the faint hope that someone will notice. Thailand, where half the 5,395 dead were foreign tourists, has at least benefited from a big and expensive DNA effort. Indonesia and Sri Lanka, where the earthquake and tsunami claimed most of the 216,000 dead and missing, have no such luxury.

In Thailand, the giant waves inflicted a truly international tragedy, striking at peak vacation season along a coastline lined with hotels.

The victims were from three dozen countries, many of which funded efforts to identify the dead, aided by Interpol and laboratories including the one in Sarajevo that works on victims from the 1992-95 war in Bosnia. The lab says that by early December its scientists had extracted and profiled the DNA from more than 1,600 of the 1,723 bone samples that arrived from Thailand, with more to come.

Communities vanished

Such an exhaustive intercontinental operation was impossible in Indonesia's Aceh province on the northern tip of Sumatra island, where the tsunami devoured whole towns. Communities were annihilated, leaving no one alive to help identify the dead.

Some still hold out hope.

Dewi Marlinda, a 23-year-old teacher in Aceh, plans to post a newspaper advertisement for her missing daughter, Tasya Zahara, who would now be 5.

"This will be our last effort. If this is not successful, I will accept my daughter is lost," she said.

"But we still hope she is alive; maybe she has been adopted by a family who love her so much that they don't want to report that she is living with them."

In Aceh, backhoes dumped tens of thousands of dead into mass graves, while large numbers of corpses were swept out to sea. In Sri Lanka, unrefrigerated bodies lay in empty rooms and hospital corridors until they could be buried en masse. Bodies swelled beyond recognition in the tropical heat.

Thailand was lucky that roads and other infrastructure survived around the crowded resort island of Phuket. Kenyon, a disaster management firm based in Houston, shipped in X-ray machines, mortuary supplies and refrigerated containers for the dead. The Australian government paid the bill.

Hoping for a miracle

Still, for people like the Shellhorn family in Salisbury, N.C., the wait was agonizing. Their daughter Carol, on a three-month sabbatical from her job as a marketing director for a software company, was scuba-diving in Thailand with her husband, Tim Massey, when the waves struck.

Massey survived, but his wife vanished.

"It was obviously excruciating ... very difficult for the entire family. You're hoping for the best, for a miracle, and fearing the worst," says her father, W.B. 'Bud' Shellhorn, 72.

Nurses took DNA samples from him and his son Doug at his office. On March 11, 11 weeks after the disaster, a State Department official called to tell the Shellhorns the worst. Their daughter was dead at 38.

"The international agencies moved quite quickly over there," Shellhorn says. "The Swedes and Australians and Japanese had forensic teams on the ground, they moved quite quickly. The State Department was a little slow in getting organized, but when they did they assigned a special representative and kept us totally informed. The State Department was very good to work with, once they got organized."

In Phuket, the Thai Tsunami Victim Identification project works in borrowed space in a telecommunications building. Forensics experts study autopsy, fingerprint and dental records, photographs of bodies and DNA samples from the dead and living.

The Sarajevo lab extracts DNA from bone samples. It ships them to Phuket, where experts on assignment from the laboratory as well as other forensic specialists try to match them with DNA collected from items such as toothbrushes that belonged to the missing people, as well as blood samples of relatives of the missing. The system is so reliable that a successful match virtually ensures the identification of a body.

The center puts 50 to 70 names to bodies each week, leaving fewer than 900 still lying unidentified in refrigerators. The project is shifting operations to Thai police headquarters in Bangkok this month, and will soon face a difficult decision: whether to keep the unidentified bodies on ice in Phuket or bury them in a local cemetery.